Cern aims to build €20bn collider to unlock secrets of universe

Posted on February 5, 2024 by Admin

Research lab submits plans for next-generation model at least three times size of Large Hadron Collider

Officials at Cern, home to the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, are pressing ahead with plans for a new machine that would be at least three times bigger than the existing particle accelerator.

The Large Hadron Collider, built inside a 27km circular tunnel beneath the Swiss-French countryside, smashes together protons and other subatomic particles at close to the speed of light to recreate the conditions that existed fractions of a second after the big bang.

Help, it’s 1,000 trillion degrees in here! The Big Bang artwork that makes scientists cry

Posted on May 19, 2021 by Admin

What would it have been like to be inside the Big Bang? We meet the ultra-hi-tech art duo who are using light, sound and sub-atomic astro data to recreate the biggest explosion ever

‘Step into the heart of the Big Bang,” says the advert for Halo, a walk-in, 360-degree, audiovisual installation about to open in Brighton. Come off it, I want to retort. You couldn’t “step” into the Big Bang without first travelling 13.8 billion years back in time and then being extremely miniaturised. After all, the universe was, according to one estimate, just 17cm in diameter at its inception.

What’s more, it was dark inside the Big Bang. In fact, there was no light at all. True, if you stuck around for 380,000 years, according to Nasa, you might have been able to see something because that was when free electrons met up with nuclei and created neutral atoms that would have allowed light to pass through. But who has 380,000 years to hang around waiting in the dark?

Cern experiment hints at new force of nature

Posted on March 23, 2021 by Admin

Experts reveal ‘cautious excitement’ over unstable particles that fail to decay as standard model suggests

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva have spotted an unusual signal in their data that may be the first hint of a new kind of physics.

The LHCb collaboration, one of four main teams at the LHC, analysed 10 years of data on how unstable particles called B mesons, created momentarily in the vast machine, decayed into more familiar matter such as electrons.

Carlo Rovelli: ‘Time travel is just what we do every day…’

Posted on March 31, 2019 by Admin

What do you ask the man who knows everything? The theoretical physicist and bestselling author answers questions from famous fans and Observer readers

Theoretical physicists and mathematicians are fond of describing their theories and equations as beautiful but very few writers are able to bring this elegance to life for the general public. The Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli has proved himself to be one of those rare figures. His first attempt at writing a book for a mainstream audience, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics (2014), outsold Fifty Shades of Grey in his home country, has been translated into 41 languages and sold more than 1m copies. His second, The Order of Time, is an appreciation and lucid deconstruction of a quality we take for granted – “We inhabit time as fish live in water,” he writes.

Like other popular scientists such as Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan and Brian Cox, Rovelli feeds our fascination with the fundamental forces that make our universe tick. Here, famous fans and Observer readers question him further.